Pandemic tracking for all
I started the COVID-19 Data Dispatch for two reasons. First: I was thinking about the COVID-19 numbers nonstop, and I wanted to write about them more. Second: I realized that most Americans were not thinking about the COVID-19 numbers nonstop. Most Americans, in fact, were very confused about where to find the COVID-19 numbers and how to interpret them.
In mid-July, I saw a tweet come across my timeline. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) no longer had access to COVID-19 data, the author of this tweet said. They presumed this meant there was no data, and they were terrified about what that meant for America’s trajectory in the pandemic.
The tweet surprised me because it was an immense exaggeration of the truth. The CDC was, specifically, no longer in control of collecting data from hospitals on their COVID-19 patients. But these data were still publicly available, as were government data covering several other pandemic metrics. Furthermore, outside organizations — like the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, where I’ve volunteered since last spring — were compiling their own numbers and making these counts public. I responded to the tweet explaining that numerous watchers of pandemic data, myself included, weren’t going anywhere. The original poster thanked me and shared my message with their audience.
But I kept thinking about this tweet. Someone, somewhere in America, had read political coverage of the CDC and immediately jumped to the conclusion that the federal government was hiding numbers. Hundreds of others shared the message. Clearly, something was wrong with the way our news ecosystem was communicating about COVID-19: readers didn’t understand where numbers were coming from or how to interpret them.
I thought, maybe I can help. I published the first issue of the COVID-19 Data Dispatch a few days later. In that issue, I explained the situation with the CDC and the hospital data collection, using neither hyperbole nor jargon. I provided both the potential benefits of the situation and the concerns I’d seen from other data reporters. And, as it turned out, I would link back to that first post again and again as COVID-19 hospitalization data continued to evolve over the next six months.
The COVID-19 Data Dispatch is an independent publication that aims to make tracking the pandemic accessible. Every week, we publish news, resources, and original analyses on American COVID-19 data. We share issues as a series of blog posts on the COVID-19 Data Dispatch website and send loyal readers the highlights in a newsletter. Issue topics have ranged from how tests are counted to why contact tracing in the U.S. is so ineffective. Our readers include COVID-19 journalists, public health communicators, and concerned citizens who simply want to understand how the pandemic is impacting their community.
My 100-day journey
I applied for the Newmark J-School’s new entrepreneurial journalism certificate program hoping to take the COVID-19 Data Dispatch to the next level.
I started the project largely as a way to write about topics that interested me, practice my data reporting, and share insights with journalists and friends already in my social circle. But it quickly grew into something broader. By September, I was spending hours every week poring over numbers, scouring for new sources, building Tableau dashboards, and even conducting interviews with data providers. I struggled each week to cut my detailed explanations down below Gmail’s email size limit. I wanted to build this labor of love into something more sustainable, that could both reach more journalists and earn me compensation for my work.
While writing this post, I looked back at my application for the program. I wrote: “CUNY’s program would bring my ideas for potential events, data literacy resources, and partnerships into reality, better serving my readers.” The program did all of this in spades: from the course’s instructors, I learned basic business skills, solidified my project’s mission, and gained techniques for audience growth and engagement.
More importantly than the skills I learned, though, this program gave me the confidence to take my project to the next level. I’ll never forget the day I presented on my project in class. I told my colleagues that I planned to start a membership program in maybe March or April 2021; but the responses came through the Zoom chat loud and clear: “Betsy, this is great!” “I would pay for this!” “Don’t wait until the spring, start membership now!”
I took their advice. After a month of intense planning, user interviews, and wrestling with WordPress, I moved the COVID-19 Data Dispatch from Substack to a dedicated website. I also launched a membership program for readers who wanted to more deeply engage with my work and with each other. (I wrote more about my decision to move platforms here, and more about the membership program here.)
So far, the move has paid off. My readers appreciate that I now send them short blurbs and links out to the website instead of massive text dumps every Sunday. The site hosts an organized archive that’s sortable by date and by post category. My annotation tables and Tableau dashboards are easily embedded in the site. I’ve even gotten a couple of readers through organic search!
The membership program is also paying off, albeit growing slowly. Even with a small number of paying members, I’m able to gather feedback from dedicated readers through our Slack server. And the memberships are helping reduce my costs, one $10 fee at a time.
Lessons I learned
Here are a few insights I took from the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program that I’d like to share with other independent journalists, especially those in the data reporting field.
- Consider your platform carefully: All the cool kids are on Substack right now. It’s certainly user-friendly for both writers and readers, but consider whether it actually supports the content you want to produce. If you’re making data visualizations, for example, are you content with sending low-res images that link out to a dashboard, or would you rather embed the visualizations on a website? What options do you want for analytics and engagement? How big of a cut are you willing to let your provider take from subscription fees? Consider these questions early on so that you don’t need to face the hassle of a move later.
- Be transparent about everything. Any good data journalist explains their methodology — or, where they found their data and how they did the analysis — somewhere in their story. But I learned in the program to also tell my readers my exact thought process on changes I made to the newsletter and what I needed to keep the project going. Readers want to see that you’re a human being, with human thoughts and feelings and decisions. For example: shortly after my re-launch, I found that the page sharing my budget was one of the most-viewed pages on my website.
- Find out what your readers need. Whether you use surveys, interviews, or social media, reader curiosities can drive your most engaging content. One of my favorite CDD issues, tackling how superspreading events are measured and how they relate to the (then-upcoming) holiday season, was inspired by a reader’s question. And I was inspired by feedback that I received in user interviews to create the COVID-19 Data Source Finder, which helps communicators navigate major sources based on which metric they are looking to report on.
- Get a collaborator. Pandemic data might seem like a niche topic, but it contains multitudes, especially now that the world is hyperfocused on vaccination. To help me pick topics each week (and take a bit of the reporting load off my back), I hired a friend to be my intern during their spring semester. Each week, we have mini-pitch meetings and I assign them one newsletter segment; they’re also helping me maintain the CDD’s annotations pages. (You can help support their salary — which I am paying largely out of pocket right now — by becoming a member!)
- Ask for help. I was surprised to find how many people connected to the program — instructors, CUNY alumni, my classmates — were willing to just talk with me for half an hour and share advice. If you’re accepted to this program or another fellowship like it, don’t be shy! Reach out, ask those extra questions, make those Calendly appointments. The advice you get in one-on-one conversations will be even more valuable than what you learn in class.
Next steps for the CDD
Over the next 100 days, the COVID-19 Data Dispatch is focused on community building.
First of all, I aim to continue developing our membership program. I’m testing out the best ways to use our growing Slack server, as well as planning out surveys and one-on-one meeting opportunities that will allow my members to tell me how I can better serve them. I aim to make the membership program into a true community space where members can seek out advice on data questions and work together to improve coverage of the pandemic.
Second, I’m running a series of virtual workshops on COVID-19 data. I’ve invited data journalists from six different publications to share their expertise with my readers and the broader science communication community. Each workshop allows ample time for Q&A. The speakers will also contribute to a “Guide to COVID-19 data,” which may be shared out far beyond the end of the series. I’m hoping these workshops give me an opportunity to grow the COVID-19 Data Dispatch community while compiling lessons learned from the past year of the pandemic.
(Registration for those workshops is now open; find more details and sign up here! The first one will take place on February 17.)
As I look ahead to the future of the COVID-19 Data Dispatch, I’m thinking again about the tweet that sparked my first issue. To one person’s confusion and alarm over a misunderstanding of the CDC’s role in the pandemic. To me, this tweet speaks to the massive gap between the doctors and IT managers who compile healthcare data — and the people who want to see their communities represented in the numbers.
Many have asked me what will happen to my project after the COVID-19 crisis is “over.” Much as I hope to get vaccinated by this summer, the crisis will never be fully “over” for me. The things I’ve learned this year, the deep chasms I’ve seen in America’s public health system — I’m going to keep reporting on them for as long as I need to.
My principles of data literacy, accessibility, and justice will continue to drive the COVID-19 Data Dispatch. I hope that readers continue to join me.
